The way the Washington Post reported the story, Congress has finally pushed through "tougher" off-shore drilling regulations for oil companies.

Two key Senate committees approved legislation before the July 4 holiday that purport to change the way the federal government regulates offshore oil drilling and that penalize companies for oil spills. Both measures passed on bipartisan voice votes. One approved by the Energy and Natural Resources Committee would raise the civil and criminal penalties for a spill, require more safety equipment redundancies, boost the number of federal safety inspectors and demand additional precautions for deep-water drilling. The other, passed by the Environment and Public Works Committee, would remove a $75 million limit on oil company liability and would retroactively remove the liability cap for BP and the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

The Postarticle stated that thesemeasures"demonstrat[e] lawmakers' eagerness to respond to the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico." The writer ought to have more accurately said that the measuresdemonstrate lawmakers eagerness to look like they are respondingto the disaster. In the real world, the proposed measureswill serve mostly aselection-year greenwashing, with little genuine impact.

Just about everyone at this point knows that liability awards will be determined not in the hallowed halls of Congress, but by knock-down, drag-out court fights. More safety precautions can gradually be rolled back or ignored, just as earlier safety regulations were rolled back or ignored in the years leading up to the BP spill.Andnone of this goes to the basic dilemma of whether drilling at these depths should be allowed at all, when the dangers are so great and the stakes so high. Members of Congress can see the heat the White House has gotten for daring (in an uncharacteristic move) to impose even a partial moratorium on deepwater drilling: afederal judge declared the move illegal, while right-wingers attacked it as something just short of a Communistic plot to destroy the nation's economy.

As long as Congress tinkers aroundthe edges of the issue, its members can avoid the explosive core. As a character in a famous Italian political novel once said, "If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change."

Let's talk about the overriding fact that no one, apparently,sees fitto mention: The great bulk of our domestic oil lies in public domainterritory along the outer-continental shelf of the United States. Since it is already owned by the public, and is supposed to be held in trust for our well-being, the threat of "nationalizing" oil is simply a strawman. Oil isalreadynationalized in the United Statesit is owned by the nation, and by the people. But we have basically turned over this huge asset to the energy industry, especially the oil and gas companies. This has been done through a huge system of undervalued, under-regulated leases that give companies a free hand to exploit the wealth of the public domain at almost no cost. The government has placed the disposition and oversightof this valuable resource in the hands of the Interior Department, which has a long history of connivance with the extractive industries...

For the rest of this article by ThisCantBeHappening! contributing writer James Ridgeway, please go to: ThisCantBeHappening!

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